are able to respond to such challenges with both aesthetic validity and ethical integrity. Their ethics are revealed or—to be more precise—contained in their poetics.
The following anecdote should illuminate the chasm that yawned between Slovenia’s defensive attitude and the militaristic policies of Serbian national mythology. During the brief period in the summer of 1991 when columns of Yugoslav Army tanks were attacking Slovenian towns and villages, Boris A. Novak sent a letter to the Serbian PEN Center in the hope that he would receive verbal support for the legitimacy of Slovenian resistance against aggression. The response of his literary colleagues in Belgrade was the first, though certainly not the last, great disappointment for Novak during his tenure at PEN. “This is war,” came the reply. “During war, people die.” An ethical revolt against just this kind of cynicism was what drove Boris A. Novak, despite his own pain, to work tirelessly to help all of those who, in besieged Sarajevo, could not help themselves.
Novak understands that hope and fear provide both individual and collective access to a narrative by which “the soul of generation after generation seeks the way.” Hence the necessity for a coherent narrative about the past in order to reach an understanding of the community’s present and future. Yet there are two distinct approaches: that of history and that of poetry. Poetry always tells the story of the specific. Thus it is “more true” than history—that is, more accurate that the story of the nonspecific, of the general.
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